The Reappearance

As I’ve mentioned before numerous times throughout this blog, the spirits at our haunted homestead are generally pretty friendly. By that, I don’t mean that they sit down for a coffee and ask how your day is going but over the years, their activity has been basically harmless. The only semi-angry event I witnessed in that house was when a shelf full of glass vases was quite forcefully unhooked from the wall it was attached to and sent hurtling to the floor. Other than that, as you know (if you’ve read about these paranormal events) they are active a lot but mean no harm. A favorite thing for them to do is to take certain objects in the house and eventually return them (usually) in unusual places.

Throughout previous posts on this blog, you will find various events of this nature. A few objects that mysteriously disappeared that immediately come to mind are a broom, glasses, a video game, a phone, scissors and a pair of shoes. The items in question were returned at some point, but always in a different place in the house. These are NOT incidents of someone laying an object down and forgetting where they put it. But if you read the blog posts, you know that already.

Anyway, today a long-missing item was returned from “wherever” in a most unusual way.

As previously mentioned, my adult son lives at the house with his grandmother. She is elderly and cannot manoeuver the stairs anymore. (You’ll see why this is important).

In 2016, my son, Scott owned a nice pair of red Puma sneakers. They were his favorite and he wore them every day. One weekend, he had been out somewhere, came home, removed his sneakers by the front door as he always does and went to bed. When he awoke, the sneakers were missing. He searched high and low and inquired with his grandmother but the sneakers were gone. 

(This was mentioned in a previous post HERE )

Looking for a logical explanation, she and several others who have been told about the mysterious disappearance, asked if he left them at whoever’s house he was visiting at. The answer was a definite “no”. No one leaves their footwear at someone’s house and drives home in their bare/sock feet. Plus, he distinctly remembers leaving them near the front door as he has been doing for years.

So how do shoes disappear?

You are probably thinking someone else could have moved them OR he left them somewhere else in the house.

The only other person there is his grandmother. She has no interest in his sneakers. The house was searched to no avail. No one else had been in the house.

Maybe the question is: how do shoes in a proven-to-be-haunted house disappear?

For the next two years he and I and his grandmother periodically wondered where in the heck the red sneakers could have gotten to. Naturally, we half-jokingly blamed “Willie”, a child ghost, known to sometimes be around, and we entertained the thought that someone was possibly running around in the afterlife with these cool red sneakers on.

I hoped that someday the sneakers would just magically reappear but Scott figured that was not going to happen. Other footwear took their place and life (sometimes hauntingly) went on.

Today, Scott called me to tell me that something super-bizarre had occurred. Knowing all the crazy stuff that has been happening at the house lately, I had a feeling the topic was going to be paranormal.

Which of course, it was.

Early this afternoon, he had gone into the large walk-in attic. He was rearranging some of the items currently being stored there when a large shoe box at the far end of the room caught his eye. At some point, he had purchased boots and this was the box they came in. He hadn’t seen this particular box in awhile, which was why it had caught his eye today. So he picked it up and noticed it had some weight to it. Puzzled, he opened the box and well, I guess I don’t really have to tell you what was inside, now do I?

Flabbergasted, he lifted his now-wrecked red Puma sneakers from the box. The last time he wore them, they were in pristine condition. Not anymore. As the picture below shows, a good portion of one side of them is torn apart. 

Creeped out yet?

Maybe this next part will send shivers down your spine: While he was telling me all of this on the phone, he said, “Ummm Mom? Someone has been wearing these. There is GROUND inside the shoes.”

I am just going to end this here as nothing more really needs to be said.

Someone took the shoes. Someone did God-knows-what with them for the last TWO years. And someone put them back upstairs very recently in the attic, in a shoebox and left them in a place where Scott would see them.

Scott’s girlfriend had no knowledge of the missing sneakers. His grandmother cannot climb stairs even if she wanted to play a ridiculous insane joke like hide shoes for two years and then ta-da, here they are.

These are the facts.

This is what happened to everyday, normal, sane, sober individuals, who just happen to live in a not-so-average house.

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Ghost Footprints: Photographic Evidence

Recently, I was fortunate enough to capture a couple of  Ghost Faces (link)  in pictures.  I say “fortunate” because it is an almost-impossible feat.  Most ghost photos are either staged, mistaken identity or wishful thinking that can’t be proven. Luckily, the ones I took have been scrutinized by photograph enthusiasts and paranormal experts. Ninety nine percent concluded that they are pretty much the real deal.

Since that, more substantial, tangible evidence has emerged in the living room of our old house. At first, when I was informed of what happened, I hesitated to even write about it, simply for the fact that it’s hard to believe. But then I considered the fact that unless you know the house and my family, you may not put too much stock in what has transpired there. And until you see it for yourself, it may not make sense to you logically. Since this blog is about the paranormal events of the house and the property on which it sits, it would almost be a disservice to not report the latest.

I can only tell you these things do happen. Draw your own conclusions and opinions, as I have often instructed before.

Trust me when I say that when you grow up in a haunted house, you get used to the activity pretty quickly. It’s just a part of everyday life after a while. There were lots of sentences like, “My (fill in the blank) is missing and it was right here 5 seconds ago.”, “There’s a lot of banging on the walls in that empty bedroom.”, “Did anyone else hear someone walking around in the hallway last night after we all went to bed?” “Did you just see what I saw standing in the pantry?”

It becomes the new norm. Our norm anyway and I can say with confidence based on worldwide reports that we were never the only ones forced to live with ghosts. But, thankfully, they were (and continue to be) always harmless so while it is unusual living conditions, there was not much to be done about it and  life just went on anyway. Of course, considering the many generations and known apparitions in the house, my mother never wanted them shooed away. Frankly, neither did I as I got older. The paranormal became fascinating on many levels to me. As a kid, I would have loved for them all to have gone away and stop scaring the bejesus out of me. I would have loved to have gone to bed at night not scared.

Just once. 

But it never happened. 

As an adult, I welcome any new activity. It is exciting, mysterious, and offers a glimpse into a world of which we know pretty much nothing about.

The activity is not based on just one person’s account of what happened. There have been many witnesses over the years to things that have happened. The point of this post or the blog is not to  convince   anyone of the validity by pointing and saying, “Look! We have a real haunted house here!” It is more like, “Come in for a cup of coffee or dinner. Oh by the way, you might see a ghost. You might not. But they are likely hanging around.” Believe it. Don’t believe it. That is entirely up to you. Some of it goes outside the normal realm of what you consider an average haunting; much of it does not.

Having said all that, sometimes something happens in that house that even by my standards I have a hard time wrapping my brain around, which is hard to do when you have photographic evidence and real, honest, trustworthy, no-nonsense people telling you that “this is what just happened.”

So for several weeks now, my son has been renovating various sections of the house, concentrating mainly on the living room floor. He removed the old carpeting to expose the beautiful, wider floor boards which are original, put down around 1871. Yesterday when he went in to do some more work, he found footprints on the wooden floor boards. There were several obvious (barefoot), child-size footprints on the wood floor. They look wet, but he assures me they absolutely are not. They did not wipe off; they are just there. The floor was mopped later on and the prints remained.

  A few interesting facts about this:

1)      The prints were NOT there the day before.

2)      They go across the floor into the wall at a particular spot that many years ago, there was a door there leading into a bedroom on the other side of the wall. The door was taken out and made into a solid wall at some point.

3)      No one in the house has a foot that size; nor did the three people (all adults) currently in the house go into the room during the time period mentioned.

           

The pictures speak for themselves. My son and the others were shocked and astounded that these footprints somehow materialized on the floor overnight. When my son told me about this and sent me the pictures he took, I was amazed.

The footprints could belong to “Willie”, a child who died there at the age of 5, in approx. 1873 from measles. We believe his spirit has made his presence known over the years, most notably when I slept there one night and he came in my bedroom in the middle of the night. He was one of the children of the man who built this house in 1871. The house has remained in our family since then.

The ghost faces in the pictures I took also occurred when the home renovations were happening. Are the deceased curious as to what is happening to their “home”? Are they unhappy that things are changing, or just keeping an eye on how things are going? Or is the materialization of the spirit faces and footprints not at all related to any reno work, and would have occurred anyway? It doesn’t really matter, I suppose.

Both happened and there is photographic evidence.

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Investigation: Deadman's Island, Halifax, Nova Scotia

"Four prisoners carried to Target Hill this morning, a place where they bury the dead. I'm fearful a number of us will visit that place this summer if not shortly released." ~Benjamin Franklin Palmer of Stonington, Conn., wrote this in his journal on June 4, 1814. He had been captured in December 1813 off Long Island, N.Y. and held in the Melville Island prison adjacent to Deadman’s Island, Halifax, NS. 

Always on the lookout for the next mysterious place with a paranormal past, my investigative partner and I have read and heard various stories about Deadman’s Island; for one, strange lights have been seen bobbing over the hill on top of the graves there. No, not fireflies. No, not other people with flashlights, flares or cigarettes. Real, actual unexplained orbs of lights. 

Luckily, we live just a stone’s throw away from Deadman’s Island. Since the weather is so much more pleasant for doing outside things, we decided to grab the trusty Nikon and head on over to this now-quaint little place. 

Today, we stood on top of four hundred graves. 

Background: 

This very small island was originally used as a military training and practice site and was known as Target Island (or Target Hill). During the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, at least 200 soldiers and sailors died in captivity on the nearby Melville Island prison (200 meters away and now the Armdale Yacht club). It held over 8,000 prisoners in its day. 

The dead were wrapped in canvas and tossed into unmarked graves on the island. 

Also buried there were escaped slaves and quarantined immigrants (typhus and smallpox were rampant for a while). 

The total number of unmarked graves on Deadman’s Island was approximately 400. 

Allegedly, there was one marked grave; that of Canadian mariner, John Dixon. 

After 1847 no one else was buried there. 

The British sold the island in 1907 to a business man who ran an amusement park on it. He called it Melville Park and ran a ferry from the mainland to the island. While digging and planting around the amusement park, three human skulls were unearthed. The park eventually closed in 1927 due to hardship caused by the 1st World War, the Halifax explosion, and the stock market crash in the 1920’s. Another man opened it as a pleasure park in 1930. Storms and land development unearthed more skeletons. 

In the 1960’s, the island was annexed to the mainland and was no longer a true island. 

It is important to note that more recently, the Northwest Arm Heritage Association, the Ohio Society of the War of 1812 and the Royal Canadian Legion collaboratively protected the island and the graves from being damaged and disturbed for development purposes. They researched British Admiralty logs and records to discover the extent of the mass burials on the island and saved it as a heritage park, established by Halifax municipality in 2005. 

Location: 

Deadman’s Island is in the south end of Halifax on the Northwest Arm. You can access the island on Pinehaven Drive off Purcell’s Cove Road. Parking is on this residential street in front of upscale houses and there is a well-developed path/entrance with signs leading the way in. 

        

What Happened:: 

Walking along a nicely established path with wooden rails and over a small bridge, you enter a more wooded area. You are actually right in someone’s backyard/sideyard but that is the way it is designed. Lots of trees surround a wide path and the odd bluejay was squawking at us to keep out. But knowing there could be grisly ghosts to be seen and photographed, on we went. 

A few minutes later we were at the water’s edge where obviously the island had been connected to the mainland. A short walk around this small shore and we found ourselves in the modern provincial park, complete with benches, plaques and signs which detail the historical significance of the island, which was right in front of us. 

 

Today, it is tree covered, with clear paths winding their way up the small hill. Between the trees, the harbour is in full view. A bit unnerving to know that each step was on top of a potential gravesite, it still felt calm and serene, with no air of creepiness whatsoever(unfortunately). 

We did come across a few weird, unexplained depressions in the ground, the likes of which I have never seen before. Still don’t know what would cause the earth to sink down in perfectly round circles. We also came across a weird teepee shaped stick structure and also have no idea why it was there. Seemed like a Blair Witch type of thing. 

Incidentally, we were there in early evening as the sun was just beginning to drop towards the horizon and even though it was still daylight, we did not see any of the ghostly lights that have been reported to plague the hill. 

                       

   

                      

(Melville Island, which is now the yacht club, formerly the prison)

Result and Conclusion: 

We don’t know. Remember reading our other “investigation” posts, in which I clearly stated that most of our exploration of paranormal places would likely end this way? Well, it applies to this one, too. 

Given the melancholy and grisly history of what went on on the island so many years ago to so many people, I don’t doubt for a second that people have witnessed paranormal manifestations of one kind or another. Unfortunately, we did not witness anything today, but alas, this is the chance you take when you set out on these excursions. Therefore, we offer no explanation of the aforementioned mystery lights seen around the island. We also did not see the marked grave of John Dixon, as noted above, if it is even still visible. 

Perhaps we will go back, with voice recording equipment and try to capture the voices of the long-dead, who were indecently piled one on top of the other under that mound of land along the Halifax shore. 

For further paranormal reading in which we mention this island AND others, check out our newsletter on Nova Scotia’s eeriest islands: 

Nova Scotia's Eeriest islands(link)

Also, the The Globe and Mail had a great piece regarding Melville Island here: 

Globe and Mail: Melville Island(link)

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Ghost Faces

I don’t think it’s all that difficult to actually “see” a ghost. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have claimed to. I don’t think it’s a case of whether or not you are “open” to it happening. It’s like seeing a blue jay or a shooting star. They are around and if you get to see one for yourself, then good for you.

Of course, a ghost or spirit can be around a certain location and make noise and move objects and that sort of thing without ever materializing; so they aren’t always visible, to the human eye anyway.

And when they are visible, most people (myself included) will tell you that they look just like you and me, not all wispy and ethereal like in the movies. Of course there are different entities so sometimes they can look like dark shadows without any discernable features. But that’s not what I am getting at so I digress.

To actually capture a ghost/spirit on camera is a near impossible feat. There are tons of pictures circulating the internet and in published books which claim to be ghost photography. But most turn out to be inconclusive or doctored pictures, or something else entirely that the photographer thought was a ghost but isn’t really.

I’ll be the first to admit our eyes can play tricks on us. I once mistakenly thought a road sign in the dark was a man standing on the shoulder of the road. Once I got quite close, I could clearly see said sign was in fact just that. Although that incident was not photograph-related, it demonstrates how one thing can be mistaken for something else, especially under varied lighting conditions (ie: dark, foggy, camera settings, etc)

All this being said, you could take a thousand pictures in a known-to-be-haunted location and examine them to death (pun intended) and never come up with anything unusual.

And that is exactly what I did.

And then one day, when scrutinizing the latest batch of pics, you see something weird.

And that is exactly what happened.

To re-cap, this blog is about the regularly-haunted house in the country that my mother owns. You are probably all very familiar with it. If not, please have a look around and become acquainted.

A lot of the time, when I am there, I take random pictures in the HOPE that someday something unusual and unexplained will present itself. Like I said, you could take pictures for years and come up empty handed continually. (Incidentally, I have captured a few anomalies over the years but nothing perhaps as solid as the following.)

Within recent weeks, I took some outdoor shots of the property this house stands on, with my trusty Nikon. (mainly of windows because let’s face it, what ghost wouldn’t want to look out at the countryside on a beautiful summer day?)

Upon scrutinizing them later on the computer, one picture of the dining room window caught my eye. A face was looking out the window. I went to the next picture and it got even weirder. Two faces were there and one of them was clearly my father-----who died in 1981.

The face in the first picture looks to be of a young girl, smiling, with long hair. Her features are still clearly visible in the second picture, right below my father’s face, and she looks more like my grandmother in this picture. 

 

For comparison, this is my father and grandmother.

I have shown the pictures to several people. All but one agrees the man’s face is my father, and that there is at least one other face (a girl or woman) and perhaps as many as three faces in total. 

There was only one person in the house that day: my mother, who was nowhere near the dining room. Nor do any of these faces belong to her.

I have clearly stated ghosts are extremely hard to photograph. But that doesn’t mean it CAN’T be done. Did I get lucky and capture something in my shots? Seems like it.

You can blow them up and add filters all day, but you have to remember the images will not act like they would if humans were in the pictures because the people in these pics are not exactly made of skin and bones. They have intangible qualities to their make-up and that must be taken into consideration when analyzing the photos.

I am perfectly fine with people being skeptical. And so, for comparison purposes, I took more pictures of the same window yesterday, at the same time of day, same weather outside, with the same camera, and nothing changed inside the house. I examined the pictures on the computer later and there are no anomalies at all.

To me, if the faces were fuzzy, hard to see or basically just unclear, I would not share them so readily. But they aren’t any of those things. They are right there, basically just smiling for the camera.

Side note: It should also be noted that I heard unexplained noises from the dining room earlier that afternoon. The dog was startled by them and left the dining room. Not sure what the source of that noise was (they are frequently heard and unexplained) but it could be related to what was captured in the photos.

Conclude what you will and decide for yourself.

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It's Baaaack!! Phantom Car, Take Three!!!

Update on phantom car sighting

Last week one day, my mother was sitting in the kitchen in her wonderfully-haunted house. Her grandson was not home and it was a few hours before he was due to arrive. This incident happened in broad daylight, incidentally.

Something caught her eye through the kitchen window. She looked in that direction from where she was sitting and saw a dark colored vehicle. Due to the color and location it was in (the exact spot her grandson always parks in), she naturally assumed he had come home early. The dog heard the car and started to wag her tail in anticipation of seeing him.

But no one came to the door. Looking further into the yard and driveway, my mother could see there actually was no car anywhere.

That’s twice now in three months.

If this is your first time reading about the mysterious, creepy car, you might want to read a bit of the backstory on this subject:

The Phantom Car

The Phantom Car Strikes Again

If you are an avid follower of The Phantom Car Experience, I don’t know what to say about this. Again.

Maybe it’s there ALL the time but people are only seeing or hearing it now and then.

Like certain spirits, could it be stuck in a time loop, driving in the driveway time and time again?

I have hypothesized a theory (for lack of any other explanation) that because there is SO much weirdness (a couple of UFO sightings, ghosts/spirits materializing in the front yard plain as day, The Man in a Human Suit, and the multitude of creepy phantom car sightings) happening around the front of the house, that perhaps there is some sort of “portal” or “void” right around there that is allowing all the strangeness in.

Am I comfortable with this hypothesis? Not at all. It’s utterly ridiculous. However, lots of ridiculous stuff happens to people all over the world. It should at least be considered when trying to figure out the source of the car.

So for now, I leave you once again to mull this over. Frankly, I am glad it is happening. 

The more times it is experienced, the more evidence there is.

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The Phantom Car Strikes Again

One night not long ago in the little community that this house stands in, there was another possible experience involving the phantom car. If you have not read about the phantom car occurrences at this residence, then by all means visit this link and catch up. 

The Phantom Car (<--link))

My mother was home alone. Her grandson had told her he would not be home until the next day, as he was away for the night. She locked the house up and went to bed near midnight.

Her bedroom is on the downstairs level and due to multiple layers of paint over the years, the old creaky bedroom door does not close all the way. She had just turned out the light and reports she was definitely not asleep yet, when she could see car headlights shining into the house through the dining room windows. 

The only time this happens is when her grandson comes home late at night, as he parks very close to the front step. He is the only person who parks that close to the house. Other family members and visitors always park in other sections of the driveway. He is also the only person who would ever arrive there at that time of night.

She assumed he changed his mind about spending the night elsewhere and had come home. She realized he might not be able to get in the house, as she has several very good locks that are secured from the inside. She thought about this, thinking he might ring the doorbell when he realized he was locked out. But that didn’t happen.

What did happen was while the car headlights were shining in through the window to the dining room, she heard movement out in the kitchen. She called out her grandson’s name, but there was no answer. Shortly after that, she could see a faint light moving around the dining room. She called out again, “Is anyone there?” No answer. 

Then as quickly as it all began, the lights and noises were gone.

She got out of bed and made her way to the kitchen, put on the light and looked around. She checked all of the door locks and realized nothing had been touched. She looked out the kitchen door window but there was no car.

She called it a night and went back to bed.

In the morning, she checked everything again but is absolutely positive no real human had been around. She mentioned to me that she thought it was the phantom car. 

The whole situation leaves a lot of questions:

1. An intruder would most likely never drive right up to the front doorstep. There is only one person who ever does that and he was not home.

2. An intruder would most likely not shine their car headlights directly into the house like that. You would think they would slink around trying to gain entry inconspicuously.

3. An intruder did not gain entry into the house as all doors and windows were still secured thereafter.

4. Nothing was out of place, upset or missing.

5. So who or what was in the kitchen and then the dining room?

6. And who is driving that phantom car around?

While my mother and I were discussing this incident, it reminded me of something similar that happened in that house to me and my brother.

We were pretty young but old enough to be left home alone, so I may have been around 11 and my brother was maybe 13. Our parents had gone out for the evening and we were home by ourselves. I remember it was dark and we saw a car drive in the driveway. I became slightly alarmed because no adults were there but figured it was someone to visit our mom and dad and they would leave again once they were told they weren’t home.

Back then, my father used to drive his car towards the back door sometimes and over time the long driveway kind of became naturally longer due to him doing this. On this particular night, the car in question drove around by the back doorstep instead of parking out front like the rest of the world would do. Then the headlights went out. With a bit of trepidation, we waited for someone to knock (I assumed it would be on the back door, which also no one ever did) as that was where the car was parked.

The knock never came. 

We weren’t quite sure what to do at this point. Who drives up to the back of someone’s house and then never gets out of the car?? The thought of how weirdly unusual this was started to really freak us out so one of us (probably me but I can’t say for sure as it was a long time ago) decided to call a friend of the family. I don’t know if we expected him to come over. He lived about fifteen minutes away but at least we were in contact with an adult who might know what to do. I don’t remember much about the phone call other than describing what was happening. And I don’t really recall how it ended—if we finally saw the car drive away or our parents came home and it just wasn’t there anymore.

I know we were extremely glad when our parents finally returned. We told them what happened but they had no explanation other than to assume someone had come to visit our father, sat there for awhile, assumed he wasn’t home and then left. But I don’t think people really do that. No one ever mentioned to our parents that they came by and sat in their car for awhile one night.

I thought about this incident once in awhile growing up but shrugged it off as just “one of those things”.

Up until this point, I always thought it was a real person doing something really weird. But when my mother told me her recent tale of the phantom car showing up in the night, she said, “I think that’s what happened to you and your brother all those years ago.”

It surely is a possibility. I had never thought of it in that context before until she said it.

The phantom car strikes again!

And again.

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Knock Knock. Who's there?

It is very cliché when talking about ghosts to hear tales of doors opening and closing by unseen hands. However, in the house that this blog is about, this very thing has happened countless times over the years. In a house known to be haunted with plenty of unexplained activity in it, I would be surprised if it didn’t have doors opening and closing with no scientific explanation.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why would a ghost bother opening a door when they can apparently walk right through walls?”

This is a great question and probably one of the first I will ask, should I ever get the opportunity to have a good old-fashioned gab session with a disembodied spirit. (Believe me, I have questions.) I would assume the opening and closing of doors is because they want us to know they are there. Like all the times they spin coffee mugs through the air. Or walk around on creaky floorboards overhead. Or bang on the  walls of the unoccupied bedroom upstairs. Or rock in empty rocking chairs. Or call us on the phone. The list goes on and on. 

Who knows why they do anything? They have their own agenda to which we are not privy. It’s like they think it is none of our business or something. They live in our houses but apparently think they don’t have to answer to us if they don’t want to. 

The very first incident I heard of doors mysteriously opening and closing in our house was when I was a young girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old. Hearing adults talking about weirdness and unexplained goings-on was just second nature during my childhood. It concerned me and freaked me out of course, like it would any kid, as it was obviously going on in my own house and I spent a lot of time playing by myself upstairs. I was usually scared to some degree to go to bed at night but I got used to it after a while and came to accept it as the way my life was. 

 As you have probably read elsewhere on this blog, I did hear a lot of noise coming from the empty spare bedroom that shared a wall with my bedroom. It was always a “spare” room so no one was ever in there. No living people, anyway.

So as I said, the first time I remember hearing about doors opening and closing on their own was very interesting and startling to me. The incident happened to a family member. He was in the largest upstairs bedroom one afternoon. He would have been a young adult at this time. My mother always said he told her he was reading on his bed. There is a door leading into the bedroom from the large walk-in attic and another door that leads out into the front hallway where the other bedrooms are. Suddenly, he looked up from his book as the door leading into the attic was opening. No one was there but it opened all the way. In a few seconds the other door opened, as if someone had come into the room through one door and exited through the other.

Currently, my son sleeps in that bedroom. There is now a sliding lock on the door that goes into the attic. He often locks it, goes to work, and comes home to find it unlocked. His elderly grandmother is the only other person in the house and she is not able to climb the stairs.

In the walk-in attic, there is also a set of rickety dark stairs leading down to another door that opens up into the kitchen. This door doesn’t close one hundred percent tight, thanks to many layers of paint around the door and casing over the last hundred years. But it does close enough that you can consider it “shut”. I agree it can become slightly ajar because of this but there is a handful of people (myself included) who have been in the kitchen and happened to look towards it at just the right moment when it has opened way further than you would expect due to natural movement in the kitchen or because the house is ‘settling”. It opens a LOT on its own.

 When my mother was a little girl, an older family member used that back staircase regularly when it was time to go to bed. He would take his lantern, traipse up those back stairs, through the two bedroom doors mentioned above and settle in for the night in what is now the “spare” bedroom. Does he still take that route at the end of the day? Possibly. 

Just off the kitchen is a wonderful pantry. And in the pantry there is a door that leads into a typical dirt-floor cellar. While there has been a lot of “activity” in the pantry, nothing unusual goes on in the cellar that anyone is aware of. However, over the span of many years there have been very loud, unexplained banging noises on that cellar door (from the cellar side) to which no explanation can be found. Not like knocking, but like loud “I’ll-bust-this-door-right-down” banging. It never usually lasts long. If you open the door and look, there is never anything visible. Lots of people have heard it. It is totally random. No one has an answer.

One particular occurrence of this was the day my mother’s friend passed away. My son and mother were the only ones in the house. Before they were notified of the death, that cellar door slammed shut (so it must have also been opened first by whoever or whatever) with an alarming noise. My son went to investigate and tried to open it but this time could not budge it even a little. It normally opens no problem, with absolutely no resistance. Finally, he hit the door as hard as he could and it finally gave. Nothing visible was responsible. Was this a forerunner to the death they would soon learn about? Did the deceased come by to let them know her time had come? Again, the answer is “possibly”. 

In a previous blog post entitled More Recent Haunted Events at the Homestead from 2011, I mentioned how my mother had experienced the dining room door slamming shut very forcefully while she was in the adjoining kitchen. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There is no wind blowing through the house. Cats can’t slam doors. There is no reasonable explanation for such things to be happening. Yesterday, my mother told me of another incident. She was sitting at the kitchen table last week and suddenly the dining room door just simply closed. Then immediately after, it opened right back up (she keeps it open all the time). She is used to all of this by now, so doesn’t get alarmed too much.

There have been other door-related incidents over the years, such as the door knob on the spare room door rattling in the middle of the night while people slept in there, to more recently the ghost of a deceased cat clawing and scratching at the front door to be let in. It stands to reason that since ghosts/spirits/etc can exert enough energy to move objects, make noise and sometimes even materialize, they can just easily open and close a door when they want to.

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Paranormal Pets (The Cat Came Back)

There have always been pets in our family: dogs, cats, rabbits, and once for a short time, a little lamb and a couple of wild raccoons. My father was known for taking any animal that was up for grabs so I don’t really ever remember a time when there wasn’t at least one pet.

Cats seemed to dominate the scene over the years, probably based on the facts that they were so easy to get free of charge, easy to look after and of course cuddly.

But as with any furry friend, there comes a time when their short lives come to an end.

Around the year 2000, my mother had one cat named Roy. My son was around five at the time and of course, loved cats. I don’t recall what happened to Roy but he did die around this time. Shortly afterwards, my brother, my son and I were in the kitchen at my mother’s house. Suddenly, we heard a cat clearly meowing outside the front door. We all sort of looked at each other because as a rule, deceased cats who have been interred generally do not show up on the doorstep crying to be let in the house. My son became pretty frightened and asked,” What is that??”

My brother opened up the door and I was wishing terribly hard for Roy NOT to be sitting there (so as not to scare the crap out of my kid) while at the same time wishing he WAS sitting there, because let’s face it: a ghost cat would be pretty awesome to see.

Well, wouldn’t you know it….no cat was visible. I made up some lie about the wind blowing around the side of the house making a weird noise that sounds sort of like a cat so my son would stop asking questions about a pet very obviously returning from the “other side”.

He bought it that time but we did hear it a time or two after that so I point blank told him what I thought it was. He spent a lot of time in that house and was well acquainted with the supernatural, which we downplayed as much as we could. But like I did (growing up there), I am sure he spent many hours, especially at bedtime, wondering what he would hear or see before dawn broke the next day.

My mother has also reported that Roy made a few visits to her bedside shortly after he died, as she could feel him on the bed beside her, just like the way he used to cuddle up next to her every night of his life. She says she could hear his happy little purrs.

Eventually, ghost Roy seemed to fall to the wayside.

And then my mother got a dark little furry guy named Casey. Casey lived to be about 13 or 14, I believe, and just died this past December (2017), due to complications from his advanced age.

My mother claims he was her best friend; always eating breakfast with her, keeping her company during the day and listening to her every word, and going to bed with her at night. He was definitely a smart little fellow in his younger days. I remember once when he was just a few years old, my mother was lying down and not feeling well with declining blood sugar. Casey knew something was wrong and cried and cried until she got up and he led her to the shelf she keeps her medications on, at which point she remembered she hadn’t taken it.


He loved roaming around outside, sometimes staying away for a couple of days at a time, causing her to worry and think he’d never come back. But he always did. He would sit on the doorstep and make scratching noises near the doorknob so someone would let him in. In his later years, he just sort of sat on the doorstep and softly meowed and didn’t manipulate the doorknob anymore.

I spoke to her today and as always, I asked my usual question: “Any ghosts around?” To which she replied, “No, I don’t think so, except Casey was here a few times.”

(She said this as casually as if she is telling me it’s going to snow tomorrow)

“What do you mean Casey was there? Like, you’ve seen him?” I asked.

My interest was definitely piqued for several reasons: One, we can add this to the pile of unexplained things in her house. Two, this is even more proof of some sort of life after death/spirit thing. And three, the “Ghost Animals” blog post can be created.

(She hadn’t given me anything to work with lately as she had not noticed anything unusual going on—I spent several days there over Christmas and nothing happened then, either. Sigh..if only they performed on command)

Then she told me she heard the gentle jiggling of the doorknob, just like Casey used to do when he wanted to come in. In recent days, it has occurred three times. Once, she went to the door to look, but could not see anything.

If I had to guess, I’d say he will probably show up next on her bed. Maybe once it’s dark and she has settled down for the night.

This is not the only incident of a pet coming home again after its death that I am personally aware of.

Our fourteen year old dog had to be euthanized several years ago. She was quite a character, well behaved and smart. We buried her beside the lake by our house where she loved to play. We returned to the house afterwards and my son and I were in a downstairs bedroom when we heard her chain collar jingling as she came meandering down the stairs and plopped into her creaky wicker basket.

We looked at each other. “Did you just….?” I was going to ask my son. With wide eyes, he looked at me, I looked at him and we both looked into the hallway where her familiar basket still sat.
"She's come home," he said.

Yup, she most definitely did.

Want to read about other paranormal pets?
Oscar the Grim Reaper

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